Though we’ll be waiting to see where the federal chips land with President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration and the congressional committee changes, Tuesday night’s biggest transportation news was the fact that local voters across the country approved scores of ballot measures that raise new local money for transportation improvements.

Leaders in Wake County, NC – including participants of T4America’s Transportation Innovation Academy co-hosted last year with TransitCenter – are building support for transit ahead of a November ballot referendum.

With a ballot measure for transit looming this fall, T4America Chairman John Robert Smith traveled to Spokane, WA to speak to city officials, business leaders, and other community stakeholders about the long-term economic and social benefits of public transit investments.

The NC legislature adjourned their session without fixing a damaging cap on state funds intended for a Triangle area light rail project. Their widely decried actions circumvented a new bipartisan state process for evaluating transportation projects on the merits and awarding state funds to the best projects, intended to be free from political meddling.

Just two years after instituting a new process to choose transportation projects based on merit and award funds in a more transparent process intended to be free of political interference, a handful of North Carolina legislators reinserted politics back into the process in an attempt to stop a light rail project in the Raleigh-Durham metro area.

Delegations of city leaders from Nashville, Raleigh and Indianapolis wrapped up the latest two-day Transportation Innovation Academy workshop in Denver last week, where they learned firsthand about the years of hard work that went into Denver’s economic development plan to vastly expand the city’s transportation options, including new buses, light rail and commuter rail.

The three mid-sized regions participating in this week’s Transportation Innovation Academy in Indianapolis are a refreshing reminder that local communities – particularly a growing wave of mid-size cities — are seizing their future with both hands and planning to tax themselves to help make ambitious transportation plans a reality. Yet even the most ambitious cities can’t do it alone, and if Congress fails to find a way to put the nation’s transportation fund on stable footing, it will jeopardize even the most homegrown, can-do plans to stay economically competitive.

Twenty-one local leaders representing three regions with ambitious plans to invest in public transportation will be reuniting in Indianapolis this week to continue the first yearlong Transportation Innovation Academy, sponsored by T4America and TransitCenter.

Twenty-one local leaders representing three regions with ambitious plans to invest in public transportation gathered today in Raleigh, NC, to kick off the first yearlong Transportation Innovation Academy, sponsored by T4America and TransitCenter.

It’s a challenge to craft a list of only five states, regions and cities that have important or notable things happening this year. Whether states attempting to raise transportation revenue this year, states changing key policies and continuing to innovate how they choose or build transportation projects, or local communities going to voters to raise money for new projects, there’s no shortage of places worth watching this year. Here are five that rose to the top, but tell us what you think we missed, in your area or elsewhere.

About Us

Transportation for America is an alliance of elected, business and civic leaders from communities across the country, united to ensure that states and the federal government step up to invest in smart, homegrown, locally-driven transportation solutions — because these are the investments that hold the key to our future economic prosperity.